when the arts do research into how everything relates
Until fairly recently, studying the arts was the pathway to all higher education. In accordance with the number of known planets and days of the week, the total of the arts was seven: rhetorics, grammar, logic, astronomy, geometry, mathematics and music. The arts taught you the power of how things relate: words, ideas, planets, bodies, intervals, tones and rhythms. All arts are hence sciences are metaphors of each other. Music for example is the tonal mathematics for rhetorically speaking to the logic of love and life via a grammar of musical styles, by making heavenly and earthly bodies move to melodic shapes and rhythmical patterns.
Modern method set out to cut through the messy metaphorical ties of each art to every knowledge. It promised one protocol to rule then all: Validate your power as the subject who knows: identify and isolate the object of your knowledge! The birth of isolated disciplines of science ended the family affair among the metaphorically related arts. Or did it? As the world is falling apart, politically, socially, ecologically, a science of relating the spheres of life would seem to be in high demand. Instead AI research, the discipline of sheer digital in-the-box-thinking, is heralded as the future. Would this not be the time to embrace research what the arts can genuinely do as sciences of out-of-the-box thinking, of picturing connections between spheres of life, using metaphor as method? Thinking relationally? Not a computing capacity issue for server stacks, but, traditionally, a piece of cake for the arts.
Jan Verwoert writes about art, plays music, and lives in Berlin. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo.
When: 12 March 2026, 17.00-18.30
Where: WH.02.209
